CMO interview: Charting a new customer course at an NFP fintech

Former Ubank chief marketing officer talks about her customer and strategy game plan at the not-for-profit charity platform provider

Jo Kelly
Jo Kelly


Team clarity, customer journey mapping and cross-functional connection lie at the heart of success for Good2Give’s inaugural chief customer officer.

Speaking to CMO just shy of her six-month anniversary at the not-for-profit business (NFP), Jo Kelly said bringing together the group’s marketing and sales teams was part of the fintech’s growth plan to lift the amount of funding it’s channelling into Australian charities to $300m.  

Good2Give’s tech platform facilitates charitable giving, enabling businesses to set up trusts, grants, charity partnerships and workplace giving programs. Established in 2000, the group undertook a digital transformation about six years ago, then rebranded as Good2Give in 2016. It now works with thousands of clients including 20 per cent of the ASX100, and aims to increase this to 25 per cent of ASX100 businesses by the end of this year.

And the growth ambitions are certainly looking achievable. Kelly said Good2Give’s solution has been in high demand in recent months as Australian organisations work to support communities and individuals affected by the recent bushfires through appeals and social enterprise initiatives.

“We had a perfect storm brewing out there – Celeste Barber was suddenly able to mobilise $50 million in donations, we had a passive government, and the fires were continuing to burns for months,” Kelly commented. “Subtly through Celeste’s work, there was a lot of naming and shaming, and a number of organisations and CEOs were exposed around what they were or were not giving. We have been inundated with calls from organisations asking how quickly they could run appeals.”  

Couple that with a general increase in consumers demanding more social purpose from organisations they interact with, the damming results of Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services industry, growing interest in the link between employee engagement and brand purpose, and now a global health pandemic with COVID-19, and you have hot conditions for an NFP operating in this space.

“This does make people who have a job much more compassionate and empathetic towards other’s slighted circumstances. I think we proved that out with the bushfires,” Kelly said. “It’s surfacing a bunch of social issues, and unemployment is just one of them. I certainly feel differently about giving.

“We’ve had more Australians giving, a huge influx of money from people being distributed to charities, and more of us taking the time to think about the common man. That’s a bit of a game changer.”

Strategy and capacity planning

To ensure Good2Give can meet demand, Kelly has just finished strategic planning and commenced a customer journey program of work, something which has never been done before in the organisation. She expects to have at least 90 per cent of all customer journeys mapped out by the end of the financial year.

“What’s hard in our business and what I observed coming into the sector is it can be really easy to over service a client,” Kelly said.

“I’m trying to free people to work on the right engagements, with a view to enhance our customer experience.”

Another priority for Kelly is overcoming what she sees as a tension point between her team and customer support, reporting to the CFO, around how larger versus smaller clients are serviced. To help, she’s bringing in PwC to help with capacity modelling.

“I need my team to have 20 per cent capacity available to do business development,” she said. “That is what will allow us to grow the business. If we’re always doing the same thing, we won’t achieve the growth we need do. We have to have process improvement.”

Kelly cited it as a challenge surprisingly no different to one she faced while CMO at UBank, National Australia Bank’s digital-only subsidiary.

“We’d drive the top of the funnel, but then have the mortgage processing team saying they couldn’t process these in the lower funnel,” she said. “Yet we were a high-growth business, I wasn’t going to turn the tap off. So we spent two years on process improvement to be able to achieve that.

“This is the same situation. I want to get more clients on-board and drive more engagement. But we then face teams struggling to take on more work. We’re trying to solve that. As we get our strategy signed off, we’ll come back to the teams, then structure follows strategy and we’ll look at how we’re supporting what we have agreed on.”

Being clear on functional responsibility and clarifying the line between marketing, sales and support is not surprisingly a key part of the process.

“Every organisation will have urban legends in every organisation about which team does which, and none of those things are true,” Kelly said. “A key thing is role clarity and being crystal clear about what I see.”

One step Kelly has taken is rewriting her teams’ job descriptions. “We had to define that grey area between customer support versus my team and who does what when and why,” she said.

“The best gift you can give anyone in business is clarity on role and who does what and why that’s important. That ensures people are more respectful on what people spend their time on, and it removes tension in the business, saves time, and gives my team time to meet clients with new product enhancements, for instance.”

Up next: The go-to-market plan, plus how to lead disruptive change

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